Mental Refinery

It's so easy to plan, but it's a lot harder to execute. The number of times I've allowed myself to think are innumerable, but that's all I ever do:

Think.

There's something phantasmal about an idea. When it's floating in your head, its potential for permutation is unlimited. Maybe that's why we never let an idea go anywhere. We're content to marvel at its raw crystalline nature. We accumulate piles of gold nuggets and freshly mined diamonds but they alone are worth nothing without a bit of polishing.

Why is it so hard to make that jump? To turn idea into action? Are we afraid that the action can't live up to the idea, or even worse -- that the idea was never good to begin with?

The solution is refinement.

It's easy to think, but it's much harder to translate your electric brain impulses into something communicable. Too many people stay dormant, unwilling to push their ideas forth, and too many others leap into action without taking the time to refine.

Refinement is the missing link.

Second Life

The academic fervor around Second Life is misplaced and pathetic. It is an intensely studied game that has more researchers than actual players. The greatest trick Linden Labs ever pulled was convincing the world of academia that Second Life is a virtual online community representative of virtual online communities.

At least, that's how it used to be. No longer are researchers using the glorified chatroom as a source of legitimate study. It's nice to see that people are wising up, but it always throws me for a loop when scientists decide to select certain games for their studies. Why use the most horrible example of a MMO to write papers about MMO's? It's like using Jersey Shore as an example of great television--not that I'm saying Jersey Shore isn't a legitimate source of study. I'm actually kind of curious as to why people watch reality garbage on television, but that's a story for another day.

To sum:

Second Life sucks.

Cross-Reference

The rise of the internet age has spawned a new generation of know-it-all's.

Every piece of suspect information can now be validated or discredited on the spot with instant access to the web on our mobile devices. But the old adage, "Don't believe everything you read/see on TV" still holds true for the internet. The increase of available factual information is directly proportional to an increase of bullshit.

The only way we can truly verify info is to cross-reference. You have to check multiple sources and make sure that they're not all using the same one. It's easy for an amazing story to spread, but if it all came from a single source, try not to put too much stock in it.

The days where a guy can swoop in and capture a room with tall tales and crazy stories are coming to an end. We now live in a culture of collective storytelling. Let's embrace it.

Douchebag

I don't know if I simply misinterpreted their words, but somebody implied to me that the word douchebag is not an insult. Not only that, but it can actually be a compliment.

In what world is this possible? This person helpfully explained to me the literal sanitary purpose of a douche bag. I think this person is unaware of it's insulting and figurative use.

But even with the literal definition, how could anyone consider it a compliment? It doesn't make sense. Maybe because it's a sexually invasive object? Would a man want to be a douche bag? I think that requires a rather high level of perverse fetishism.

There's really only one way to interpret being called a douchebag:

You're being insulted.

Friendly Coaching

I firmly believe in the power of mentors and leaders to inspire action. This principle is none more demonstrable than with our own personal circle of friends. I would even use this as a measure of how great our friends really are. So how can our friends inspire us?

Easy, as cheerleaders.

How often do you honestly cheer for your friends, beyond mere acknowledgment of congratulations? As a friend, you are in the unique position of providing support. All you really have to do is hold them accountable.

We can try to set goals for ourselves but most of the time, we fail to complete them. Since we personally set them, it's easy for us to make excuses when we fail, but how can we make excuses to someone else? That's why we have parents and teachers to make sure we're in the straight and narrow.

As adults, we try our hardest to detach ourselves from such figures and embrace a measure of independence, but without the structure of school to provide us with a clear cut path to success, we enter a cycle of self-letdowns.

That's why we should use our friends as motivators, as people that we don't want to let down. Just knowing that you have someone vested in your success makes you more motivated.

Think about all your friends. Do you have someone who is absolutely lazy and seems headed for a dead-end life?

Maybe, just maybe, you can be the spark to light them up.

The Bar

Our standards are too low.

Parents nowadays are too easily satisfied with "good grades." Good grades doesn't mean jack in the real world. What I'd like to see a little hands-on application. It's one thing to recite knowledge, but its another to put it into action.

So rather than reward our sons and daughters for getting good grades in school, we should actually assign them projects. Given our access to technology, I don't think such assignments are out of the range of your average school student.

What kind of assignments you ask?

Tell them to make a movie. It's really easy nowadays to record footage and splice them together.

Tell them to get all their classmates information. Give them a bit of a salesmanship savvy.

Tell them to write a story, fictional or real.

Tell them to make goals, and make them connect the dots necessary to complete the goals.

Tell them to record things, to keep tracks of small details like what kind of clothes people are wearing at school, what kind of accessories are popular, and how often they're worn.

Just tell them to make things.

The thing about all these tasks?

They're quantifiable. The results are observable, tangible, and real. These are the kinds of things that count for more in life than letter grades.

I beseech you, let's raise the bar for our youth.

Match Made in Heaven

There's a fundamental problem with eharmony, which supposedly pinpoints your perfect match depending on your profile. It's completely reliant on user-inputted information. People hardly know what they want, much less who they are. Even I don't trust my own self-assessments. We can hardly be a good judge of character if we're not in touch with our true selves. How can you tell if you're truly introspective, or if you're just plain fooling yourself?

Then again, I suppose that's the entire idea of finding a soul mate in the first place. Perhaps the only way we can truly know ourselves is through someone else. It's not like we know what we look like without a mirror, wouldn't the same apply to personality?

Matchmaking isn't an exact science, but there are enough trends, rules, and tendencies to help a person decide whether or not that special someone truly is "the one."

Anything that can pierce the veil of nonsense that covers our society is a plus in my book. So can we get rid of the stigma of online matchmaking already? Storybook meetings are just that, meetings in a storybook. I'd like my relationships to have a solid basis on data and probability rather than fairy tale presumptions.

But...I might just be fooling myself.

Sense of Urgency

Safety nets are quite dangerous.

It's true; they save your life when you fall down from great heights, but unless you've tasted high-altitude air, a safety net is all you will ever know. Nets are meant to catch you, but they have a nasty tendency of getting you all tangled up. The twine digs into your skin, wraps around you, traps your body, and never lets go.

Try not to get too complacent.

Only danger can get us to move. Perhaps the only way we can get higher is to invite a little of bit danger into our lives. So try not to get to comfortable.

Who knows how long that net will hold?

Office Politics

This is purely an issue of politics -- office politics.

This kind of nonsense wasn't part of the job description. Now I find myself asked to navigate some fairly treacherous terrain, land laden with hidden mines where things may just blow up at any moment. I am, and will always be, an impartial observer. My inclination is always to see things from both sides, but for this case, I lean towards minority opinion. The ability of the minority to invite such an overwhelming majority to the contrary displays a skewed ratio of cause and effect. From one small ripple, a tsunami arises, and in that giant wave of water, all sense is washed away.

It is Week 4, and problems seem to spring forth from every crack in this organization. At our Tuesday meeting, after a jolly ol' round of office updates, the president revealed a troubling organizational issue. It has come up before, in a previous meeting, the issue of Club Outreach and Communication. This issue almost reduced the president to tears. The problem is either personal or logistical in nature, but when you're frustrated, it might be hard to tell the two apart. Because I know that I don't have all sides of this story, I'm not backing any horse just yet. I don't like to speculate on the particulars of things I know not about, so I will never declare anything I say as the absolute truth. I can only talk about the things that I have seen and heard for myself. Unlike most people, who spend inordinate amounts of time yapping, I never say anything. The problem with talking is that you don't listen while you flap your lips. The only thing you hear is the sound of your own voice.

So what is the problem here? I'm still not sure that I completely understand, but I'm picking up pieces here and there. Apparently, there's some interoffice feuding. The President's Office and Student Services aren't properly communicating with each other. The veracity of this statement is up for debate, and perhaps owing to my unfamiliarity with most of the people in the office (this is my first year), I can't sense it. I've heard stories to the contrary, but I wonder whether or not such stories are being painted with prejudice. There are many explanations for a rude or curt response from a comrade, and it does no one any favors to assume why without putting in the effort to actually find out why.

The fundamental attribution error describes the phenomenon in which we ignore any possible external factors and simply blame the person's behavior as a part of their personality. After being brushed off by someone, we could either assume "he's a jerk," or "he must be having a bad day." We can never know for sure unless we ask.

Any evidence that supports interoffice feuding is entirely secondhand to me. I heard of the case in which one commissioner went to Ben with an idea that was curtly rejected. It could be erroneous to attribute that curtness to the conflict of Club Outreach and Communication. It could simply be a case of personality, rather than any lingering side effect of Student Services vs. Office of the President. I can't comment on curtness, possible rudeness, back talk, or bristling in the presence of the "enemy." Another piece of this interoffice feuding was a story relayed by the president herself, to all the commissions, that "half of Student Services hates me." I haven't heard any such talk (then again, I don't hang out with the Student Services interns) around the office. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm just saying I haven't experienced it for myself. Joy and Mareesha also told me that they had experienced some frigidity at Starbucks, where they greeted some Student Services people but were then promptly ignored. Borna, who said he was friends with all the Student Services people, also sees tension.

Even with all these people claiming that there was tension, all of them came from the President's Office. I haven't spoken with anyone from Student Services, but my biggest question is, did they feel the tension too? Does tension exist if only one side feels it? Perhaps I'm being too short-sighted here. Perhaps my peers were able to understand that any seed of tension will quickly grow and escalate into full-blown war, and that they had to take dramatic measures to stem such an event from happening. That would explain why a curt demeanor could suddenly transform into outright hatred, but a leap of logic is required to reach that conclusion.

From the office of the President's side, it sounds like conflict over Club Outreach translated into organizational discord, a sort poisoning of the well. Frustrated and angry, the executives said nasty things about the other office to their subordinates. These nasty things create fictional ulterior motives. Now the Office of the President wants an athletics commission, they want to take over Student Service's job of Club Outreach, and now rumors have spread, and these rumors have changed the interaction between the two offices. I wonder now, who is truly victimized?

If the Student Services people altered their behavior towards members of the President's office because of rumors, then certainly the onus would be on them. Alternatively, the president's story to the commission convinced all of us that Student Services is talking behind our backs, and this news altered our behavior. The question is, who is ignoring who?

This is just my hypothesis, but if I spoke with any of the Student Services people, I predict I will receive stories similar to the those I heard from my co-commissioners. In another scenario, they might not have noticed any tension at all, and it was all imagined on our end.

This is a real-life case of Rashomon, a story fraught with multiple perspectives and contradictions. Is there an objective truth in this web of deception?

Too bad I'll never find out.

Feel So Free

I'm a man of simple taste.

My needs are few and my wants even fewer. I am easily satisfied; so when I am asked about my long-term goals, it only follows that I give a simple answer:

Financial freedom.

What do I mean by this? I want the ability to do as I damn well please with my money without worrying about survival, without stress over loans, mortgages, or credit bills. All I want is gravy, no debt and pure profit.

It's nice to want things, but its a different story when it comes to actually achieving them.

How does one start a quest for financial freedom?

As with any quest, the first step is preparation. You have to stock up on inventory, armor up, and train before setting foot in the real world. The most important tool in this quest is money. It boggles my mind why people would take their most important tool and hide it, allowing it to languish in low-yield savings, or even worse -- doing nothing in a checking account. An offense even greater than inefficient utilization is the abuse of credit. You're taking your money and hammering it against objects you can't afford until your most important tool whittles away into nothingness.

Too much of our money's potential is squandered between debt and apathy. Granted, one cannot avoid operational costs since we need a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, and transportation to get us places, but one has to differentiate between needs and wants. The ability to do so will build up personal capital.

In the guide of sound financial advice, you will hear two things: cut back and save. It's a simple strategy that eludes too many of us, but it provides a steady path towards our goal of financial freedom.

I was never one for the tortoise.

I prefer to leap over obstacles to land in great positions without years of sweat and toil. It's a risky method of living, but the rewards are too great to ignore. If I'm going to go into debt, it will not be because of foolish purchasing habits, but because of risky investment behavior.

I have observed that nobody in my family has really dealt with investment opportunities either in the form of bonds or stocks. Maybe a CD here or there, but nothing that screams "Wall Street!" My brother-in-law is enamored with the prospect of real estate and believes that land is the key to wealth. I won't argue about the worth of homes and the gains from renting property, but I feel that land is still too much of a slow burner. Land requires development, development requires a lot of start-up and operational costs, and it could be decades before profit is realized.

An intellectual such as myself prefers to deal with the realm of ideas. Intellectual assets, not physical, are the real money makers this generation. Social networking, mobile devices, inter-connectivity, advances in communication technology is where the real action is at. Nothing will replace standard industry such as automobiles or basic home-keeping products, but their steady returns are dwarfed by emerging industries that never even existed years ago.

We can be tortoises or we can be hares. You can bet on the veteran and make a tidy sum, or you can put it all on the newcomer and win big.

Whichever path you take, your quest starts now.

Outliers

Everyone of us knows an outlier.

A special kind of person who seems to have everything in the world coming to them. A person who, through some exceptional means -- whether it be true talent, amazing luck, an affable personality, or a great support system -- enjoys life to the fullest. By the mere act of walking, all obstacles fold in awe of them as they waltz through the thicket of life. Friends nip at their heels, the only time you hear from them are when they post photos from foreign countries, and they shout status updates about car chases, shootouts, and explosions. They possess a worldly palate, having tasted delicacies from Africa to Asia, they have actually seen National Geographic scenery in real life, and they know how to find a good place to take a dump in five different languages.

All the while we sit in our homes and spectate their spectacular lives from afar. We ask ourselves:

"How do they do it?"

"What do they have that I don't?"

"Why are they off living the dream while I'm still stuck here dreaming?"

We can't even console ourselves with the thought that we may one day pass them because deep down inside, we know they'll always be above us, and we will be trying to catch up for as long as they live. Despite our envy and resentment, the moment we meet them, we are reminded of why this person is so much better than us.

So what do we do?

Be happy for these outliers?

Ignore them to maintain the integrity of averages?

Acknowledge their skewed life?

I can't speak for anybody else, but I can only take solace in the old adage that one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

Ocean

A wave is coming.

With each second that ticks on by, with each minute that passes, with every day that becomes yesterday, I feel a noose tighten around my neck. It’s getting tighter as the earth spins. It fixes me in place, and I struggle helplessly as I watch a wave as tall as twenty feet approach from the distance. Unless I can cut myself loose and build a makeshift raft out of cash in two months, I will drown. I’ve got to turn this around somehow. I have to ride the wave, not be engulfed by it. I have to ride the crest as far as I can; farther than I have ever gone before, and hopefully, I can reach my destination.

Otherwise, I’ll spend my whole life floating out in the ocean. Time to get organized, sophisticated, and operational.

Paralell Processing

Computers are pretty neat creations that were designed with one idea in mind, "efficiency." A well-built machine can eat anything you throw at it, provided all the components work together in complete synchronicity. This means no bottlenecks. The processor isn't holding the GPU back, or the RAM isn't holding the system back, or the OS isn't holding the RAM back. To acquire such a beast of a machine that does everything well will cost quite some coin. That's why there are different configurations that meet different needs. Some people want a fast processor for video editing, some people want a cool and reliable machine for simple word processing and web browsing, and some just want the best of the best because they want to max out Crysis 2.

People are the same way. Replace processing with "thinking" and everything else with "skills." Companies look to hire specific skillsets. Some look for specialty machines designed to do one task really well, and some are just looking for well-rounded systems that can do a little bit of everything. There has been a shift in work philosophy however. Just like how processors have evolved from single core to multiple cores, so too have people shifted from specialists to generalists.

If you try looking for a single-core processor nowadays, it might be more expensive than you think, simply because they're out of production. The old-school experts are the same way. They make the big bucks simply because they're professionals in a small field, but this makes their expertise all the more rare.

When it came to my work, I used to do it in single-minded fashion. I grinded it out until I was done. Given that my time has now been split up in seven ways from Sunday, I can no longer afford the luxury of doing 5-hour marches. So I had to upgrade myself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I now possess the ability to work in projects in parcel-parallel fashion, which means I do a little bit of work on a different project each day. Instead of completing projects one after the other, I work on multiple projects in congruent fashion.

Computers don't have the ability to adapt themselves to different situations, fortunately, people can. That's why we can update computers with different parts and make them adapt to the different tasks we throw at them.

Ask yourself this: Do I need someone else to help me adapt, or can I do it myself?

Trolls Be Trollin'

There are 3 types of trolls: The fun troll, the dumb troll, and the natural troll.

1. The Fun Troll

The fun troll just wants to mess around and f with your mind. There's nothing malicious about this brand of trolling. Unless you're Joe Pesci, you'll have a nice laugh at the end of the troll session. It's all in good fun.

2. The Dumb Troll

The dumb troll is a troll who persistently makes outrageous comments not because he's trying to be disingenuous, it's because he's too much of an idiot to realize that he has been duped. These are the types who stubbornly refuse to change their mind and regurgitate untruths. Feel pity for these trolls and move on.

3. The Natural Troll

The Natural Troll is a troll who is not trying to troll at all, it's just how he is. It takes a special kind of asshole to be constantly trolling every part of the day, but he's not trolling--he's just living. It might be best for your health to avoid Natural Trolls at all costs.

Everybody trolls. It's all a matter of what kind you are. As with all things in life, moderation is the best policy. Too much trolling and you'll find yourself stuck on an island with giant blood-thirsty crabs who love the taste of troll. Consider yourself warned.

Impulse

One of these days, I'm going to get over that little impulse that tells me at first glance to "bail out!" Knowing that a task is ahead of me, I allow my apprehension to make the decision: don't engage at all. This a particularly nasty habit of mine that might be responsible for a great deal of lost opportunities, how great I will never know. What I need to do is change this impulse from a negative one to a positive one. My first thought can't be "I'll do it later," it has to be "I'll do it now." If I can train myself to think that way, I do believe that my output would increase by an amazing 100%.

It's mental obstacles like these that threaten our potential. A lifetime of second-guessing and cognitive dissonance under the guise of calm rationalization only trains us to become self-satisfied sheep with no urge to do anything interesting outside of our zone of comfort. Ditch the zone, get uncomfortable and force yourself to do things that you wouldn't until you feel comfortable doing it. Widen your zone and become a beast.

Don't hedge, go ahead and bet the farm.

Laziness

I believe that every individual has the capability to be a hard worker. Laziness is not physiological, it's just a mental affliction. If we all had our own personal therapists, laziness wouldn't exist (although I might be giving therapists too much credit). It's an issue of willpower and whether we have enough of it to overcome our cultural need to do nothing.

Laziness can't be inherent. If we are to believe Darwin, laziness would get you killed. Laziness is a byproduct of modern technology, a once luxury now turned into everyday commodity.

If anything good has come out of laziness, it's the idea of working smarter--not harder.

People have a limited amount of energy each day that they could direct towards thinking or doing. I wouldn't call it an efficient use of resources if you make a guy do a single repetitive task for an entire day. If one engineer thought about it hard enough and built a machine to do the task for him, bravo. He's too lazy to do it himself, but smart enough to build a machine to do it for him. That's efficiency.

That's all I'm really talking about. Doing more with less. Let's not get ourselves bloated with filler and nonsense just because we could afford to. Not all problems can be solved with hard work. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do, is to actually think about it.

Reaching

I have two types of friends. I have the reachers and the reached. People don't have infinite attention spans, so we're forced to focus on a few people. Even though there are persons with hundreds upon hundreds of "friends," realistically, they only deal with ten at most on an intimate level -- or even fewer.

That said, when it comes to setting things up, certain friends have certain contact preferences. The majority of my friends are reached, because they're lazy or self-entitled. How great would it be to just relax and let others ring me up all day long? By default, I have to be a reacher. The only way to get anything done these days is to reach out to others. Somebody has to get the ball rolling.

Backdating

I had the opportunity to post this yesterday but I consciously held back as to demonstrate the wonders of the internet. As it is, I actually did post this yesterday, but you would've never known. Unless you're an internet sleuth of the highest order, there is no way for you to actually know that this is backdated.

I could very well go back into last year and fill out all the empty dates if I wanted to, but there's really no point in doing that. While this is a chance to show off one of the neat features of the internet to be both past, present, and future, there's also another reason I held back. My workspace is infected with flies, and at night, these particular flies are vicious. These insect bites leads to furious inflammation and itchiness. This nonsense actually prevented me from running last week, simply because the discomfort would've been too much to bear. It also means that I'm restricted to operating during the day or morning. Night work is off-limits lest I suffer from another bout of scratching ankles.

F the flies.

Journalistic Secret Sauce

I can never understand the public's fascination with celebrity progeny. Why would anyone want to see pictures of somebody else's kids? The stories that garner the most traffic are ones that deal with completely trivial issues like Hollywood. I do seem to remember something about a looming crisis about raising the government's debt ceiling, but the front page is telling me to be more concerned about how great this A-lister looks on the red carpet. We wonder why paparazzi's are so vicious when we eat their shit like flies on a hot summer day at the park.

We're just drawn to people. We want to know about others because people are a source of infinite engagement. But do we really need to feed on a steady diet of celebrity gossip? That's why Facebook is so popular. It takes celebrity gossip down to our level. We can entertain ourselves with never-ending news updates from our "friends."

How do you get people to care? What's the secret sauce?

Write about what they know.

Place

You know what I tried today? I decided to do my usual blogging routine -- but with one crucial difference -- I did it outside. There's this conception that artistic types are more withdrawn, as if we all needed personal space, an appropriate and quiet environment to let our creative juices flow.

As a writer, I've read articles about how to solve such niggling issues as a writer's block or finding the right time of day to let loose our creativity. I think it's mostly nonsense but there is some merit to a change of scenery. As of this moment, I am writing in my notebook at Hart Park (this is obviously transcribed then), surrounded by wind, green grass, and warm sunshine. Maybe it's the place or the fact that I jogged out here, but it feels like my brain's loose. It's a lot easier to write down what I'm thinking.

Typing has spoiled me. I forgot how physically tasking it is to simply write with a pencil. Much more time-consuming as well, but it feels better for putting down raw ideas.

The reason I decided t ago outside was to avoid the stereotype of a holed up writer. I wouldn't want to emerge from my cave with pale skin and sunken eyes. Who says you can't be creative outside?

New addition to my routine.